What's next?
I could continue to invest a tonne of time into EA, drive up my stock price, but to what end? And if I miss a day, or worse, one of my investments miss a day, my stock dives or my portfolio does. Twitter and Facebook both don't require me to do anything at all on a day to day basis. I can check when I want, contribute when I want and ignore both when I feel like it. Foursquare and Empire Avenue are both quite addictive for the first little while (EA a few days and Foursquare a few weeks). After that, they lose their appeal. There just doesn't seem to be much to entice me to come back over and over. I've figured out the system and moved on, before my invites have even all been sent out... Not a good thing.
For a social site to be successful it needs one of two things (in my mind):
1. The flexibility to come and go as I please and not suffer when I miss a day or
2. Enough game mechanics to sustain interest and keep building upon my addiction.
Thoughts? What's your experience with EA (Or other social game sites) like?
Posts
I'd be really interested to get your thoughts about how we can improve. The site isn't intended to keep you coming back constantly -- if you're consistently active on other networks (like FB and Twitter), your stock should continue to rise to a certain level... trading on the site does affect your share value, but it's not as important as interaction with external social networks.
ReplyDeleteI'd guess the general idea of trading isn't what would be most appealing to you -- we've seen a lot of people get value out of the site as a way of finding new bloggers and new people to engage through social media.
Anyway, please do let me know if you have specific thoughts about what you didn't like, what we could change to better appeal to you, etc. (tom - at - empireavenue.com)
Cheers, and thanks for trying the site out.
Tom
Good question Tom. First off, thank you for posting. What I'd like to know more about is the mechanics of the game. I've tweeted, written blog posts, updated facebook, traded stocks and my own stock price still went down. I'd like to understand more about what is required to keep my stock at a nice even level or drive it up. Does the site factor into my score my investments? Meaning, will my stock go up if I have good investments? Is there a way to recommend stocks to other users? How are the dividends calculated?
ReplyDeleteI guess I was looking for a little more game... I really didn't join the site to find more blogs to read. I was pondering what would be the next level to keep me coming back, but I'm not really sure at this point in time. What can we do to extend the idea of stocks and people's ratings? Are there ways to extend the interaction with EA to other sites beyond EA (Updates on Facebook from EA, etc). An iPhone/Android/Mobile HTML5 site would be awesome (Is one in the works?).
I was even playing around a little bit with the REST API and seems fairly straight forward, but I wasn't sure what I would do to mash it up with something else (Again, thinking of the reverse integration to Twitter/Facebook or something like that).